josh edmonds

On Tuesday 5th August 2014 the Harris clan gathered for the funeral of Josh’s grandmother Pat Harris. This was the third family funeral in as many years and we were quite apprehensive about yet another cremation and the possible return of previous painful memories. As she bore her mother’s coffin into the crematorium Jane was conscious of her now ‘orphan’ status and what this might mean both as a daughter and a mother. In a sense we have been caught in the middle of different generational deaths – while we have a good enough word – ‘orphan’ – for a child without parents, we are yet to discover what we should call a parent whose child has died. And while the feelings and the sadness and the pain are so very different we both felt it important we should somehow equate them and make Josh too part of this ceremony for his grandmother. We have a lovely photo of Josh (aged 3) on holiday with Pat and Gerry – sadly one of only a few of the three of them – which we included on the order of service and Josh was mentioned a number of times throughout the day. To be honest this is not easy, we do not want to ‘dilute’ that sense of honour and respect we have for Pat, but at the same time her death and her funeral (as did Gerry’s) wouldn’t seem nearly as significant without Josh being there too. After all he was their grandson and theirs to mourn as we mourn them.

In the end this blending of memories seem to work even though many of Pat’s friends had never met Josh. Compared to the way we said ‘goodbye’ to Josh, both Pat’s and Gerry’s funerals were more mute affairs though we carried forward the idea of inviting people to write messages on ribbons which could be tied to a flower and laid on the coffin as a central ‘doing’ act to the ritual. Although there are strong Jewish roots to the family, our funerals are non religious and perhaps a bit ‘modern’ provoking one elderly relative afterwards to remark “what kind of funeral was that?” Our wonderful celebrant Ian Stirling was quick to respond – “that was a Pat Harris kind of funeral.”

Funerals are of course for the living – and for what we take away from them as much as the memories we bring. We were all very moved by the poem that Jane read at the service and reproduced below. We know now that grief is hard work, maybe not so much for the death of a parent or a grandparent as it is for your child; but work nevertheless. And in that work, and in that experience of grief, inevitably we learn new things, new ways of looking at life. That is the gift our loved ones leave us.

“Comes The Dawn” by Veronica A. Shoffstall

After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security,
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads on today,
Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans,
And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure…
That you really are strong,
And you really do have worth.
And you learn and learn…
With every goodbye you learn.

This is one of the last photos we took of Pat, just two months before she died. We had recently collected Gerry’s ashes from the undertakers (this was over a year since he died – why it took so long is anybody’s guess) and Pat had asked that they be scattered around a particular tree in the old family home near the golf courses in Troon. The tree had been given to them as a wedding present in 1951 and was one of many that Gerry planted subsequently in the many years they lived there. But the house now has new owners and we needed to get their permission. We had planned to do this on our next visit but life and death intervened.

It was the day following Pat’s funeral then, that we met again for another special ritual. Jane had asked the present occupiers of the house who kindly obliged – and with considerable grace as their afternoon was about to be disturbed by eight adults and two children, none of whom were dressed in the manner customarily required for the dignified disposal of a family patriarch. Neither of us can remember being so involved in the funerals of our grandparents. In fact we were positively discouraged from even attending. In those days it wasn’t seen at all appropriate that young children should be present on such occasions – something to do with protecting their innocence, shielding them from sadness, from raw feelings. Yet here we were half a century later, on a bright summer’s day wandering around somebody else’s garden, carrying a box of human remains and with kids in tow!

‘With every goodbye you learn …’ And that learning can and maybe should start at any age, best done in the act of doing, of actual participation in ritual. For Pat and Gerry’s great grandchildren, Naomi and Louis, even while they may not recognise the full meaning of this day, hopefully they will remember the weight and the feel of their forebears ashes as no less fearful than the bark on the tree and the dirt in the ground.

Thank you for reading

Jane and Jimmy

August 2014

For an evocative set of photographs from the day of Granny Pat’s funeral please take a look at this gallery

BEFORE GOODBYE

This is Emily, my mum and Joshua’s grandmother. She is 96 and has alzheimers dementia. Until a few months ago she was still living in her own home and on her own. Then, after yet another fall in the middle of the night, and yet another visit to hospital, we decided to accept the inevitable and look for a care home where she could live out the rest of her days in relative comfort and safety.

And that’s what she is doing now – living out the rest of her days. And what we are doing is preparing for another ‘goodbye’. Visitors to this website will have seen our posts to honour Jane’s father Gerry who died earlier this year. As with Gerry (though tragically not with Josh), we can take our time as we gather ourselves for what will be we hope a very ordinary and peaceful death – a death in the right order of things. Though the fog of dementia is thickening by the day there is still enough Mum there for us to collect our thoughts and share some laughs. Jane and I visit as often as we can. Sometimes together, sometimes separately. I enjoy my moments alone with Emily. I’m making up for the moments I couldn’t spend with Joshua before he died.

How you doing today Mum?

Much the same, old and doddery

You’re looking well

Am I? I don’t feel it. It’s about time you put me in the oven

I know. You’ve been saying that for ages

Have I? Can’t remember…. What’s the day today

Wednesday

What time is it?

Half past twelve

Can’t you do something?

How do you mean?

Help me

Help you what?

Just help me to go. I’ve had enough …

Emily is not unhappy. She is not distressed. It’s only when she gets a urine or some other infection that she can become a bit agitated and start to hallucinate. But these are minor episodes in a life that is gradually and quietly ebbing away. Of late when I visit, I often find her still in bed, not bothering to get up and dressed. Any talk of going for a walk, across the road to the pub, or just downstairs for a cup of tea is now redundant. She is still bright and alert, if muddled and very forgetful. This does have its advantages. I can tell her over and over that my brother Ned will be visiting from America in a couple of weeks and her smile receives the news as if for the first time.

But she is tired; she’s tired of living and not afraid to say so. She has always stubbornly asserted what she wants out of life even if, as often happened she failed to get it. And at those times she has accepted her fate with grace and humour. She never ever want to live on a chicken farm – that was my Dad’s idea to help pay for our education. She hated the idea of her little ones being sent away to boarding school but agreed it was for the best. She was dogged in her determination never to end up in one of ‘those homes’ but now she has, she quite likes it, at least that’s what she has chosen to like – seeing, as for her, it’s so much like home, it’s not really one of ‘those homes’.

Our talk of how long she still has left to live comes with surprising ease. Maybe that’s because, since Josh died, I am now much more in tune with what death really means to those of us who are still here. It certainly is a relief to be able to converse with someone about to die without fear of upset. I say ‘about to die’ only because, for the moment, we are merely talking about it rather than expecting it any time soon. I’ve been witness to such conversations for many years now. This is Emily and her friend Yvonne in 2008.

Yvonne: I don’t think any of us are going anywhere. Talk about going to heaven and hell is a lot of nonsense. I think when you die that’s it

Emily: Oh that’s what I think too

Y: You didn’t exist before you were born

E: No I said where were you before you were born

Y: You weren’t activated then

Jimmy: What do you think happens then?

Y: Well I think you go to sleep and you’ve had your life. Eternal life doesn’t mean that the person lives on forever in one form or another. Not in my mind. Eternal life to me is the eternal chain of people having children. You’ve given life to another being and hopefully they’ll go on …

E: Yes and they’ve given it too and on and on and on …

Y: You see I’m the one who’s let the side down. You should, by rights have children.

E : You’re the one that’s ended the line

Y: Yes, that’s wrong

Josh’s grandmother

Josh’s great grandmother

Our line of course doesn’t end with Emily. She has three children, eight grandchildren and four great grandchildren and we spend many hours trying to remember who belongs to who. For memory to function it seems, we need a narrative. A faulty memory needs a narrative even more. My mum has lots of these stories, she tells them over and over and we try to listen as if we are hearing them for the first time. There’s the time when during ‘the war’ her father refused to give her a pay rise so she ‘upped and left’ to find another job in a Liverpool department store – but when she got there she discovered the place had been bombed during the night. All that was left was a man at a desk in the underground car park “if thee wants a job you can get yourself up t’roof and keep a look out”. Maybe one should never question the wisdom of old age, even when big holes appear in the logic of their stories. But if the store had been bombed so, how come there was still a roof to look out from.

There are similar quirky errors in how she narrates the story of Josh’s death. Josh was traveling up the road when a woman stepped out – he swerved to avoid her and went under a bus coming the other way. Well its a good enough account and we are not about to challenge it. For her, as for us, its not how Josh died but the fact that he’s dead that is so… so painful. And in the same way that she hears with singular pleasure, the oft repeated news of my brothers arrival, so she must visit the shock and the distress of hearing about Josh’s death again and again.

Josh is up on the hill now isn’t he. There’s a gap in the hedge and you can see right down the valley. I want you to take me up there too.

Two out of three Mum. Josh is up on the hill and you can see right down the valley, but there is no hedge. It is a wonderful view especially as the sun sets and of course you can go up there with him. He’d love to have you by his side.

We may have years yet before Emily goes; or it may be only months before we say goodbye for real and forever. But I know that, because we have these talks, and because we can still share our sorrows, when her time comes, our final farewell will have greater depth. It will resonate longer and with less pain. If only by contrast with Josh’s death, his grandmother’s is, at least in ‘the right order of things’. And who knows as and when we say goodbye to Emily for the last time, we will see Josh in the distance waving as well.

Thanks for reading

Jimmy

October 2013

(To see how Emily’s conversation with Yvonne went, it features in my film THIS IS PURGATORY which you can view here)

SAY THEIR NAME, the film we made for TCF was up for an award for the Best Internet Bereavement Resource category of The Good Funeral Awards – and whaddya know – we won it!

Jimmy, Pam St Clement, Jane

Hmmm… Strange trophy perhaps – a minature wicker coffin but given that the event is organised by THE GOOD FUNERAL GUIDE hardly surprising – and its bigger than an Oscar (and lighter than my Bafta!) In effect The Good Funeral Awards are the annual shindig of what we have come to know as the “deathies’. In attendance were the great and the good from the world of funeral directors, celebrants, bereavement counsellors, coffin builders and grave diggers – as well as Pam St Clement (whose on screen death as Pat Butcher in East Enders has clearly touched many a heart) was there to dish out the prizes.

Josh’s death is of course why we are here. If Josh had not died we would not have become involved with The Compassionate Friends, we would not have made their video, and we wouldn’t be standing shoulder to shoulder with some of the most caring, compassionate and enlightened people we have met, because in truth these ‘deathies’ really are such. No morbid bunch of funeral stalkers these, more, this is a movement that is in the forefront of changeing the way we all deal with and talk about death. It truly is a terrible thing, but in a way it has taken the death of our son for us to really find that degree of self knowledge that allows us to be more accepting of death and more comfortable talking about it. To paraphrase one of the delegates Clarissa Tan – recognising “the finality of death is hard, but the uncertainties of life are perhaps even harder” – to talk about death really is to find out more about living.

And thats what we were doing in the run up to the award ceremony, as we joined a dozen or so others in a yurt in the garden of the hotel in Bournemouth. Have you heard of ‘death cafe’s’? Well this was a ‘death cafe’ and they are springing up all over. A bit like pop up restaurants but with death on the menu … a freakish, weird thing to do by most peoples standards maybe, but here atmosphere was relaxed, intimate and unafraid – no one blinked and there were no awkward silences when one member announced she had cancer and we told of our loss. All were equal whatever their story – death as the great leveller!

Death Cafe

Back to SAY THEIR NAME and the awards. This was a glittering, champagne laden affair taking the form of all such occasions – “the nominees are …. the winner is” etc. And it didn’t disappoint as we sat nervously clutching each other, ready to be losers but wanting to win. Ah! the competitive spirit that always trumps even the most sober cause. Maybe not quite that sober. Acceptance speech? Jane was brilliant – no blushes and no gushes – enough said. But we can say that representing the film and TCF at the award ceremony was a real honour if only because people have been so positive about it – as per these quotes

“One of the most moving pieces of film that I’ve seen and utterly deserving of multiple awards in testimony to the powerful truths spoken by the parents we saw.” Fran Hall

“Wow that is brilliant (she says wiping away tears) … I hope that I can use this short film in my work. That footage has really helped me especially today since yesterdays funeral of a 15 year old girl so tragically taken is fresh in my thoughts.” Claire

“I was with each parent and sibling, deeply listening to them name and remember their loved one. It’s a good thing, this.” Kate.

I am still in awe of people who meet death everyday in their professional lives and I wonder what draws them to be undertakers, celebrants or soul midwives (a new one this). I suspect most have had painful experiences, themselves, but instead of hiding them away, they are using them to help us all confront our deepest fear – not of death but of life.

First off, I’m so sorry about the sudden death of your sweetheart – I do know something of the pain and confusion, the despair and deep anguish you are going through, so I want to send you my own feelings of compassion and love at this time. I haven’t read much of your blog yet but the fact that you are sharing stuff so soon after Claire’s death is, I believe, not just a brave thing but a healing thing too and the hopefully the best way forward. As you say, being public about your grief helps you to feel normal, that you are not alone and from that we can all take huge amounts of comfort.

Our son Joshua died in early 2011 and I too immediately started to write and muse about how my interests in photography could help see me through. I didn’t publish anything at first, but then we started our own website to honour and remember Josh – www.beyondgoodbye.co.uk – and that has led us to get involved with a number of charities dedicated to helping people through grief, and try and get a bit more acceptance in what people describe as our ‘death averse culture’. Have to say it has not been easy, but then it was not really a conscious decision to go ‘public’ with our grief – it just happened cos that’s what we do and we wanted to able able to stay in touch as much as possible with all Josh’s friends – and where better than on-line. The difficult bit has been the way many of our close friends (in the ‘real’ world) seemed to have been scared off but our continual mention of Josh and the public things we have done for him since he died – grief is traditionally seen as a private matter – it does afterall get in the way of life’s day to day business of earning a living, cleaning the car, watching footer, having sex and generally being happy and productive. Or does it? Possibly, but only if you see grief as something in which we shut ourselves away in a darkened room so that we can be miserable all the time. Which of course it is not. And that said, two and a half years after Josh died and all those difficult feelings that we and our friends have experienced have now begun to ‘normalise’, I think that by not hiding away (although I still do that a lot of the time) we have been able to face fears (for many the worst fear they could imagine – the death of their own child) by sharing them and in doing so all our lives are enriched – at least I hope so.

So thank you for sharing your grief – its not a shameful thing and these days I believe its not such a difficult thing – the internet has given us such great opportunities in this regard – you have made us feel a bit more normal and I hope you feel the same.

The wonderful Lewis Murphy, the first candidate to follow in Josh’s footsteps and work as an intern at the Ministry of Sound is coming to the end of his time there. He’s been writing a blog each day – and its hilarious. Thanks Lewis and well done.

‘Waking up on a Friday morning with a banging headache and the early signs of flu is not the way anyone would want to start the day, but that is exactly what happened the day of my interview. So I dosed up on ibuprofen and paracetamol and prepared my self for the interview….’

‘…. She had a thick Jamaican accent and with her was her friend who just looked really relaxed and chuckled every now and again. They were such nice and funny people, talking to me loudly not caring what others thought as they casually rolled up a couple of joints in front of me. We rode the train together all the way until they got off the stop before mine …’

‘The thing I’m enjoying most at the moment is working in this friendly environment with good music being played all over the office at different times and hearing the banter and either seeing or hearing the work that other people are doing and being blown away by it’

‘As Steve the station manager went down the list of songs for us to listen to on the massive screen at the end of the table we researched the artists and discussed their ratings in other charts and playlists. On one occasion Steve miss spelt the name of one of the artists and we ended up with crazed looking pictures of Mrs. Bush from George Bushes presidency, if you look at her left eye it does look like she has an evil twitch’

‘… After I’d finished up and started to head back I head a a faint noise over my headphones. I took them off and saw people getting out of their cars and people standing on the side of the road staring. Some man had tried to pull a U turn and plowed into the opposite pavement and into a pole, ripping out the front wheel, suspension and all! No one was hurt but the car was pretty mashed up. A good thing to live by I think is don’t pull a U turn in London… ever’

‘… I carried on sorting the tapes until I came across something that made me stop in my flow of work. A tape titled ‘BTS KID CUDI JOSH TAPE’ This must have been something that Josh had filmed while he was here at MOS. In fact it had suddenly hit me that most of the tapes here were probably filmed by him’

‘Unfortunately being fresh out of university I’m not exactly rolling in it so could not afford to go down to the market to which Steve said, ‘well… sounds like you need a… some kind of a float…. At which point he goes to hand me £10! I could not except that! ‘Do you know how much money that is!?’ I said ‘Yeah it’s £10′ Steve said in his Irish accent with a hit of what are you talking about in his voice. Marco laughed and just said ‘take the money ….’

‘Hot, hungry, thirsty and with music so loud my ears were starting to hurt I slowly became zombified. For 2 hours this dance was played and it was well past my time to take a break but I did not want the show to sound like arse so I stayed on through laughing with the guest and chatting as much as I could muster without letting the groggy heat frustration get the better of my mood …’

‘On the journey home I thought about how incredible had been today and just could not help but smile all the way back! Thinking of my friend Josh Taylor and the strange gifts in a way he has given me and thinking of Josh Edmonds and again the strange gifts in a way he has given me also. I want to do them both proud and make the opportunity’s I get from this internship be lasting and push me forwards into a career that I enjoy and love doing! So thank you guys for all you’ve done with out even knowing.’

That sleepy picture – the one that Josh used for his business card – the one that has become such a poignant reminder of who Josh was for us. We take it everywhere we go and we took it with us to Vietnam and Cambodia.

It’s a photo of Josh pretending to be asleep. He is not really asleep, he has closed is eyes on my request and in a sense I am in that picture too. You can’t see me but I am there – as a father and as a photographer, two roles, two identities that I cannot imagine being without. The photo was taken as a joke really. I was in the middle of a project taking photographs of people, most of them random strangers I met in the street – but with their eyes closed – and one day, on a rare visit to London, we decided on the spur of the moment to do one of Josh. We were with his brother Joe having a drink on the South Bank – that is Joes hand Josh is leaning against. I thought no more of it until Josh turned up a few weeks later showing us the design for his business card with ‘that sleepy picture’ as the background. It reminded me of the time many many years ago when my father took some of my photos and made some water colours from them. I felt as if there could be no nicer a tribute to my skills and the way I like to see the world. We all like recognition from a parent, do we not. Well ditto in reverse with Josh – I had no idea he thought much at all about my ideas as a photographer (and maybe he didn’t) but to follow them through as a way of promoting his own work (he worked as a video producer for the Ministry of Sound) was very very gratifying.

There is so much in that photograph for me and I could go on for hours about what it meant then and what has come to mean since Josh died. Of the moment we took it I recall being slightly surprised at how both brothers were happy to join in with my weird ideas. But I also I remember how little I was seeing of Josh since he moved to London and how I would savour every moment with him; and I remember how much he had matured since he’d left home and how much I valued his easy unhurried attitude to life. As with all photographs of loved ones who have died there is a terrible tension between that moment of their aliveness at the time the picture was taken and the photographs ability to live on beyond their death as a constant reminder of their absence. There is both pain and joy co-existing in a way that has no equivalent. Particularly so with this image of a boy pretending sleep, the more poignant now depicting as it does, a young man in perpetual sleep.

For this and many reasons then, the photograph now represents a real and continuing bond between the two of us. Unable now to take any further photographs of Joshua I have reworked it in numerous ways since Josh died (see this gallery here ) and from time to time, I take it out of my wallet, place it on a hillside or on a gatepost, or simply hold it in view and photograph it. Somewhere in all this is the idea that if we have a record of Josh on our travels, its proof that we haven’t forgotten him – it is one of the many foolish ways we have of staying in touch with him.

Josh’s brother Joe – May 2013Josh’s Mum, Jane – May 2013

This is Halong Bay, a four hour drive from Hanoi and one of Vietnam’s foremost travel destinations. We wanted to go there, one because it is an amazing sight, two because you get to stay over night on a luxurious junk, but three because it was one of the places we knew Josh had been. And we knew he been there because we have the photographs to prove it.

Josh (3rd from left) with friends at Halong Bay

Josh had traveled to South East Asia on his own but had met these young men in Laos and they rendezvoused again in Hanoi making plans to ride south on motor bikes. Of the five friends pictured here, Dominique and Don (to Josh’s right) and Jesse (second from right) would be with him at the time of the accident. They are the ones who sent us all the photos we have of Josh from his time in Vietnam. They are the sort of photographs you would expect from a young man traveling the world, meeting new friends, seeing new places, and wanting to send a message back home – here’s me over there, having a brilliant time, I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.

But if they are the sort of photos any of us might take as a momento of our travels, as often as not, they aren’t photographs of the actual journey or adventure, or of the variety of moods or the emotions that would accompany it. More often they are of the moments between the highs and the lows, constructed to the give an impression rather than a record of a good time. We take time out of whatever it is that we are doing, specifically to pose with thumbs aloft, or to gather together in a group and smile for the camera or in our case, to pose with our photo of Josh. And for good reason, we are there for the adventure after all not to make photographs of it. Or are we? Is it possible that these days, our travels and our adventures have no validity and possible then no value, unless we photograph them? As a friend mentioned the other day, they confer on us ‘bragging rights’ like stamps in a passport. But it is the one sure way we can prove we were actually there and I know that without these photos (and all the photos we have of Josh) we would be far more lost on our own journey and our own purpose of keeping his spirit alive.

Imagine that we didn’t have a single photograph to remember him by. Not one. Not even as a baby or a little boy growing up. How would that be? Would we forget what he looked like? Did he have short hair or long hair? Did dimples appear everytime he smiled? Was that really a man’s beard or still the down of youth? And without his likeness in a photograph, how long would it be before we forget him altogether? But even if the power of his likeness is overwhelming, does the fact that these are staged pictures, mean that we might lose too soon the sense of who Josh was rather than what Josh looked like. We have no pictures of Josh climbing the steps to that viewing platform or lugging his backpack on board the boat. None of the stuff that would tell us more of how he was possibly feeling. We have no more than the photographic evidence of his presence in Vietnam and they cannot really tell us how confident he was with these new friends; was he nervous about the bikes they had bought, weren’t they just a bit pissed off with cold and the rain. He is not here now to tell the stories behind the photos and without his voice there is no anchor to secure what little we do know of his adventures. He had told us on the phone just how cold the north of Vietnam was in winter time, how pleased he was to buy a replica North Face jacket at half the normal price, but we must use our own imagination to complete a narrative of their trip first to Halong Bay and then south on the Ho Chi Minh Highway.

We don’t know how long Josh spent on Halong Bay. Given the price and the season we suspect his was a day trip. We were visiting in summer and were able to make slightly more of it spending one night on the boat, visiting some caves, eating some fine food and diving in for a swim in the rain. Unlike January when Josh was here, the summer heat is oppressive. It is also the start of the rainy season and when it rains, it rains. It rained all night long and into the morning by which time we had had enough floating luxury.

On our return to Hanoi, we decided to mark Josh’s presence there by scattering some of his ashes in Hoan Kiem Lake. Translated this means The Lake of the Returned Sword after the legend in which the then 14c King was ordered by a holy turtle to return the sword that had helped him defeat the Chinese invaders. The turtle’s descendent is said still to live in the lake and like (or maybe unlike) the Loch Ness Monster, there have been numerous ‘sightings’. To the north of the lake is a small island on which stands the Ngoc Son Temple connected to the shore by a pretty bridge. It was here we felt most appropriate to stand again for a moment, to remember Josh, and to feel a little more connected not just to him but also to the Buddhist traditions that are everywhere part of Vietnamese life. Josh of course was not a Buddhist and nor are we, but being in a country where Buddhism is so strong helped us to understand and to be more comfortable with his death. Remembering and honouring those who have died is such an ordinary part of everyday life in here, that our little ritual, public as it was, provoked little interest with passers by. It was hard to feel grievous, or even that sad. Such has been the welcome we have received in Vietnam. it wouldn’t be until our return home, that I would again feel the full force of Josh’s death, the sharp ache of my boy’s total and forever absence.

To give our ceremony more substance, we again drew on the power of Josh’s photo. We tore the pictures of him from one of the Order of Ceremonies we had used for his funeral and watched as they drifted down in swirly gig fashion to float on the surface. If there had been a current no doubt we would’ve rushed to the other side of the bridge and wait for them to appear as they continued their journey downstream. As it was the ripples on the lake gradually softened these shreds of a life, and Joshua’s image slowly sank beneath the surface and disappeared from view. At the same time we let his ashes trickle through our fingers and into a slight breeze that had quietly begun to stroke the water.

How many times in the last two and a half years have we said goodbye to Josh? Somehow it did feel easier this time. Now that we have witnessed the place where he died, I think we are more secure to let him go. Now that we have found a tradition that allows the dead to continue living without embarrassment, we are more comfortable with the pain of our loss. Now that we have scattered a small part of him in a strange land we are more able to nurture our memories and to construct anew our own special rituals. And as Josh and his death find their place in our own family mythology, so perhaps, we can accept them as a more natural part of the human condition, part of that continuum of stories and legends and narratives that we all need in order to make sense of our lives, whatever our culture.

There was,however, no sign of that elusive turtle.

From this moment, we would leave Josh’s card along with others’ offerings and gifts at shrines and temples all across Vietnam and Cambodia. Buddhism has granted us a gift, and even if we don’t share a belief in an afterlife, the opportunity to borrow from other traditions and other customs has been (excuse the pun) a “godsend”. Because of Josh and his travels, we have been able to reflect on the many ways in which people find a connection with in an inner spirit world, to wonder at the power of collective imagination, and to discover how it really is possible to live with death in your life. Being human has come to mean something so much more since Josh died.

Standing as it does in the centre of Vietnam’s capital city, the Ngoc Son Temple is as much a tourist attraction as it is a religious venue. And as tourist are, so tourists will be. Just inside the front door, sat an elderly man earning a living as a scribe; selling his skills to worshippers and visitors alike. For five dollars we commissioned this beautiful example of calligraphy – we chose the characters with care but I’m afraid I have now forgotten what they mean.

The next day Joe had to fly back home. Jane, Rosa and I flew to Siem Reap in northern Cambodia. There was of course sadness in our parting as well as a certain anxiety that has become part of the baggage of our family life whenever we, as we must, go our separate ways. To let go of the sight of each other has and, I suspect, always will be much more of a wrench since Josh died.

Josh’s plans once he had traveled through Vietnam, was to continue on to Cambodia, back to Thailand and then on to Nepal. Our two weeks in Cambodia represented that part of of his trip he was unable to do. We visited the temples of the Angkor Archaelogical Park and then travelled south to Kampot on the coast and the capital Phnom Penh. There follows, as a conclusion to this post, a selection of photos of scenes and people we met during our time in Cambodia. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. Since a young boy I have been drawn to the magic of photography. Hyperreal and pretending veracity it is, I think, the most surreal of artforms. A photograph has the unique ability to capture life, collapsing it into a single moment, while at the same time casting a spell that will outlive us all. Photographs can tell big stories and little stories but always from the past. A photograph always was, though it alludes to being now. It can never be the future yet it breathes with possibility. In a sense then photographs defy time itself and in a sense, you could say that photography is always in ‘Joshua’ time.

Look in any travel guide for Cambodia and you can see fantastic photographs of the temples of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, Bayon etc. Recognised as one of the seven wonders of the world, they are part of a huge area that was once the centre of the Khmer Republic (9th to 15th c). This was a period of great prosperity but also of continual change, politically and spiritually, with Buddhism and Hinduism alternating as the predominant religion. The ruins are covered with carvings and reliefs depicting various myths, legends and bits of propaganda. Highly symbolic and full of narrative they read like a storyboard for an epic Hollywood blockbuster and they must have expected to be seen as such. Not unlike photographs they are still images that have outlived both their makers and their subjects.

As I wandered around the grounds of Baphuon, this butterfly settled on my hand. I know many people who would say that this was a little bit of Josh’s spirit visiting me for a while. Well maybe, but probably not. And actually it matters not because in that moment I could believe that too; for the comfort it brought, and the stillness it represented. And it hasn’t been the first time I have been seduced into relinquishing my disbelief in some kind of afterlife; the tiny green frog that appear at the foot of Josh’s tree on the day we spread his ashes there; the crow that sat and watced as I ate my sandwich in a motorway service area on the M6; a white butterfly that accompanied us as we walked to the hill village of Tiglio near Barga in Italy. This little butterfly stayed with me for a good half an hour, occasionally flying off to circle around me and land again. Long enough for me to take a few snaps so I could share the experience, authenticate it, tell stories about it – to ‘brag’ about it.

As tourists (as opposed to travelers) it is difficult to engage properly with the history we are walking through, but we do love to brag about our visits to historical sites and monuments. All the more so now that we can achieve this within an instant. Modern technology has given us license to record our presence ‘in’ history, but often only to the extent that we agree with its potential to make it and us into commodities. In many ways we have sacrificed who we really are and where we come from, to a generic and ubiquitous ‘facebook’ image that does no justice at all to the moment or the place.

In common with many cultures, I suspect that I have an unconscious wish to believe that Josh is not really dead, merely sleeping – sometimes I can imagine him opening his eyes any moment now, if only to wink at me. In any case, I have found that my images of people asleep, while the world continues around them, speak to that sense of ambiguity we have between sleep and death.

We are grateful that Josh did not die of hunger or violence, from hatred or in war. In the late seventies, during the time of the Khmer Rouge, over one million Cambodians including many children did suffer such a fate. (this actually represents 1 in 8 of the total population). It was a humbling experience to visit Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and Choeung Ek Memorial (one of roughly a hundred ‘killing fields’) near the capital Phnom Penh. Most haunting are the thousands of photographic portraits that line the walls of the Museum, originally the Tuol Svay Pray High School which was turned into a torture, interrogation and execution centre by hardliners of the Khmer Rouge. Of the 14,000 people known to have entered only seven have survived. The vast majority were carefully photographed before being brutally tortured and forced to confess their ‘crimes’. Inevitably we will draw a comparison between our tragedy (a single personal death) and the horrors of this mass killing. Not all, but most of these portraits are nameless, their anonymity to a certain extent, protecting us from their real lives, and their real deaths. This is forensic photography at it’s most clinical but also at it’s most revealing. Look at that mother and child, she will know they are both soon to die. And rows upon rows of children and young adults staring forever long past their execution date, maybe the only photographs of them that survive. See how fortunate we are to have so many photos of our Joshua – particularly the one in which he is feigning sleep.

Cambodia is now a young country. 96% of its population is under 60 and only a very few remember the civil war at all. The following photographs are the result of mostly very brief encounters. As portraits they too hide real identities, though their very anonymity may help us connect to a common humanity in which life and death can be, should be such an ordinary events.

It’s nearly four weeks since we visited the spot where Josh was killed. It was a big moment and has taken us all a while to take stock, reflect on what it has meant, and to fit it into the story of our travels. Does that sound strange? After all that was our main purpose for going to SE Asia. But we have done so many other things too both in actual practical memory of Josh as well as stuff that had little to do with him. As well as our ‘pilgrimage’ we were also on holiday and discovering many, many, wonderful things about Vietnam and Cambodia; about their peoples all whom we met were so generous in their dealings with us; about their culture and history both recent and ancient; about their food, their transport systems and their weather, all so foreign to our European sensibilities but so revealing of the spirit of both countries. Any way as a final posting (or series of postings) we’d like to share with you some of the photos and the stories behind them from the days following our visit to the roadside near Vu Quang where Josh’s life came to an end.

Our journey to Hanoi was in effect the reverse of Joshua’s last few days of his road trip. Along with some friends he had met in Laos, Josh spent much of his time in Hanoi looking out for and buying motorbikes that would take them on the 1800 km journey south to Saigon. Josh made just under a quarter of that journey and now we were taking a bus that would take us as far in 4 hours that the boys travelled in 3 days. Our mood was buoyant. Surprisingly so given that the day before we had been experiencing the sickening reality of the place where Josh had died. Maybe our good humour was a relief. We had survived the ordeal of physically being in the place where Josh breathed his last, along with the anxiety provoked by thoughts of whether this was the ‘right’ thing to do, of the fear of not being affected by that level of ordinariness that we were hoping to yet scared to find. That we had survived it with our emotions intact, it also had so much to do with Uoc and the generous nature of our Vietnamese hosts. Uoc (the English speaking schoolteacher who was called to help translate for Josh’s friends) really had done everything to make our visit to his town and to scene of the accident as easy as possible. I can only imagine what we might have felt like had he not been there to shepherd us and to take care of us in what would otherwise been a such an anonymous, unknown and potentially empty experience. Because of his planning and because of the humanity he brought to that moment, our visit to Vu Quang was in the end, as much about life as it was about death. (see our previous post – a letter to Josh)

Uoc’s final act of kindness was to book and make sure we got on the bus at first light of day. After walking us back from his village just outside Houng Son the night before, he was up again at six organising the pick up from the hotel. I had never been on a ‘sleeper’ bus before but they are common throughout Vietnam and are often used for long journeys even in daytime. And this bus was ultra modern, air con. comfy bunks and pure joy. We dubbed it the ‘playbus’ – there was an area at the back with no seats; just a space to loll around in, play cards, go to sleep, whatever. Personally I could not be tired and spent most of the trip getting to know, or trying to get to know the other passengers. When language barriers are so high, I find having a camera is a good way to break the ice.

Two of the three driversShe’s his “sister” – I think he saidJosh’s sister RosaHanoi – the ‘old’ quarterHanoi – the queue for the Ho Chi Minh MausoleumHanoi – Poster shop

Hanoi, Josh had told us, was the most exciting city he had visited in his three months of travels. With its tightly packed streets, it is noisy, crowded and vibrant with an energy that truly is like no other capital. One of the things we wanted to do there is to find the hostel where Josh had stayed. I’m not sure what we were expecting to find. Some clue perhaps, some material form of connection to his few days here, to know that he had stayed in this room, slept in that bed, we’d be somewhere where he’d been enjoying himself, a newly independent soul traveling the world. Whatever going to Vu Quang was about it was a place where Josh had died – now we wanted to find some place where he’d been alive.

There are only two backpackers hostels in Hanoi so it wasn’t going to be difficult to find the one where Josh had stayed. It was the second one we visited that turned out to have a record of Josh booking a place there. We took a look around. Plenty of young folk at the bar, lounging round the TV set, here was a pool table and a notice board with adverts for motorbikes for sale – nearly all of them Honda Wins! In the two and a half years since Josh bought his second hand Honda Win, nothing seems to have changed much in the way young people are traveling and trading their way round Vietnam. As much then as now the Honda Win is the favoured method of long distance transport and today as it was yesterday, the bike is in the temporary ownership of every other backpacker – bought for a couple of hundred dollars in Hanoi and sold a few weeks later in Saigon. That Josh should be riding one when he had his accident now feels less like a cruel twist of fate, more like an ordinary accident in which he was the tragic participant.

Hanoi Back Packers Hostel – Honda Wins For SaleHanoi – traffic

Our current knowledge of the traffic system (so horrendous,so impenetrable and seemingly so dangerous on first sight) also helps to allay our misgivings that somehow it was the crazy way people drive in Vietnam that was the cause of Josh’s death. For one thing, it seems as if there are no rules. But does that mean there are more accidents? In the four weeks we were in SE Asia, and after spending many a moment mesmerised by the amount of motorbikes criss-crossing at various intersections, we saw no accidents, not even a near miss and I have come to the conclusion that ‘no rules’ may not be such a bad thing when it comes to traffic control. In fact I think its probably a good thing. In the UK, for instance, a driver will defer to the rule of road – give way to on coming traffic, claim priority at a round about, indicate when turning right and so on. And being a conscientious rule observer himself, this allows him to get irate when someone else breaks a rule. But being a conscientious rule observer doesn’t necessarily mean that you are a conscientious people observer. At home in Gloucestershire, if I take a slight risk and start to overtake a lorry lumbering up the hill, an on-coming car is more than likely to engage me head on with a full blare of the horn and flashing off headlights (oi fucker get out of my way!!! – you are in the wrong!!! – you have broken the rule!!). And he would be right, even if his attitude be offensive. But his emphasis is on the rule not on the person he is about to collide with. Not so on the highway or at intersections in Vietnam (at least as far as I could discern). I never saw one moment of road rage. In fact the traffic in Hanoi and other towns we visited seems to work on the idea that you do everything to avoid running into another road user even if that means slowing down to a stop. The best way to imagine this is as if you are in a pedestrian shopping precinct. Here there are of course no rules or rights of way for people on foot, and yes there might be a slight altercation now and then as shopping bags clash, but no one gets hurt or injured because most times people observe and avoid each other. And thats kind of how it works on a Hanoi intersection – although people have a little motor and two wheels between their legs they don’t have a whole raft of rules to go with them, let alone rules to hide behind when things go wrong, leastways, the rules that they do observe are the basic ones of human interaction and consideration. And it works, it must work or they’d have invented rules, and rights of way, and sanctions and punishments to make it work. But they haven’t. Instead the Vietnamese are masters, not only of loading their bikes up with as much as possible, (people as well as baggage), they are very adapt (sometimes in very skillful, even acrobatic ways) at avoiding bumping into others and avoiding injury.

In our remaining weeks in Vietnam and Cambodia we would be traveling many hundreds of kilometres along highways such that Josh would have been riding. On numerous occasions we witnessed overtaking (as well as undertaking) manoevures that would have had European hairs standing on end, but each time the on-coming vehicle slowed down and gave way. This may be reckless of me to say so, but it feels like on Vietnamese roads there is a great observance of life than there is of rules and it reminds me of something my mother always used to teach us as we were learning to drive – ‘He was quite right as he drove along, but he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong’. Be that as it may, if ever there was a rightness or a wrongness to Joshua’s death, our own experience of Vietnamese traffic comforts us to know that neither its crazy rules nor his own possible carelessness have anything to do with it.

Four up – or even more. Not an uncommon sightAs long as Joe was standing still while he took photos, he was in no real danger of being run over.Front steps – Hanoi Downtown Back Packers Hostel

Although Josh had booked into the Backpackers Hostel it wasn’t actually this one he stayed at. This one here, we were told, was ‘downtown’ Hanoi; we should be looking for the one in the ‘French’ quarter. At this point Jane told us she really didn’t want to pursue this search much longer. People grieve differently and situations can throw up very different challenges for all of us. We are both parents whose son has died but our mood swings differ and we are still learning more about how the other responds or reacts to new situations. So it is that Jane and I have different responses to to seeing or meeting people of Josh’s age, doing the things he wanted to do, doing the things he should be doing now. Jane finds it too painful. I can enjoy seeing Josh in their faces. Unaware as they are of the trauma we have been through, I like to imagine him in their clothes, wondering what they are listening to under their headphones, what they are planning for the next stage of their journey. This is different from two years ago when the hurt and injustice of all that he had lost would have filled me with an inconsolable resentment. Now I am edging towards a more conciliatory response and can be thankful, happy even, that these young men still have their lives. For Jane though seeing their tanned and healthy bodies, and hearing their laughter is still so difficult.

Josh – January 2011Joe and Trang – May 2013

That evening, Joe and I walked into the ‘other’ hostel in Ngo Huyen Lane just north of St Joseph Cathedral in the ‘very’ French part of the town. The first thing I saw was the map on the wall and I recognised it beyond any doubt as the map Josh was sitting in front of in a photo sent to us by his friend Dominique. Somehow and for some reason I felt we had arrived. Our bus journey and our entry into Hanoi had given us the flavour of Josh’s own journey, but here we were now actually standing in the spot where he had actually been – no doubt about it. As important as it was to make our pilgrimage to Vu Quang, for us to be alive and breathing in the very same space as Josh had been alive and breathing seemed to give more substance to our connection with him. Over there was a line of travelers tapping away at the internet, and behind us, with similar disinterest, a steady stream of plump, pink yet scantily clothed young things traipsing through the lobby. We introduced ourselves to Trang, manager on duty that night, and told her our story. Trang has worked here for over three years but with so many travelers checking in and out every night, she couldn’t remember our boy. Not that that would stop her fully engaging with our purpose – it was her suggestion we should add Josh’s name to all the others on the wall. This felt like a gift to us, a gift from a stranger, who for a moment became our friend. We were discovering as Josh had done, that when you travel it is really quite easy to establish quite close connections with others, albeit briefly.

In our case of course death is at the centre of any such encounter. At home I have sometimes found talking about Josh and expressing my grief with close friends a difficult and uncomfortable experience. Whilst traveling though, it has been relatively easy to talk about our loss with people who don’t know us. There is I guess less baggage around – of the emotional sort. It may also be true that in cultures like those of both Vietnam and Cambodia, talking about death is a fairly ordinary (and therefore less threatening) conversation. Certainly there have been only a very few who have not responded to our story with genuine empathy and understanding. If there is still a healing to be done, then this comfort of strangers has played a significant part. When Joe and I told Jane about the hand prints she and Rosa now felt able to join us at the hostel.

The French quarter in Hanoi – Ngo Huyen Lane (the hostel in the distance)Scenes in Ngo Huyen Lane, Hanoi’s “French quarter”

Thank you for reading thus far – it helps that we can share our experiences in this way. In the next posting we decide how to distribute some of Josh’s ashes, take a visit to Halong Bay, and engage the services of a caligrapher.

We’ve done it. We’ve been to Vu Quang where you died in the middle of the road. It feels nearly as hard to say that as when we first heard the news of your death. But it is real, just as your death is real so we really have been to see the place where you died and to meet some of the people who were there at the time. In a sense these are the facts, what we make of them, how we remember them, what stories we tell around them and where we put them in the timescale of our own lives is another matter.

Our day began on the morning after the night train from Hoi An to Vinh. Actually this final part of our ‘pilgrimage’ to see where you took your last breath really started as we boarded the train with that sense that here we are at last; after more than two years we will soon be connecting with you in a way that we never wished we’d have to.

The train is cramped, crowded and noisy and we get very little sleep but as the morning light comes up, we now know that we are in Ha Tinh province, up until now only a name on a map, a name in a police report. We are glued to the window as the countryside lumbers past, spellbound by the sheer number of lotus flowers and paddy fields all with peasants in conical hats working the land. Our first opportunity to soak up the atmosphere of rural Vietnam.

Next door to us is a family of 10 happily cramped in to their tiny compartment. Their two youngest boys have spent much of the journey (irritatingly and charmingly) tapping on our window and pressing their noses against the glass and then running off down the corridor chasing a tennis ball. Squeezing past them is the steward and his trolley offering up rice and soup for breakfast which we decline politely. The last timewe were on such a sleeper we were on our way to Italy. You were eight and Rosa was three. We were going to spend a week with Sam and Doone and their Mum Adrienne. Remember the dead snake they were so keen to show us as soon as we arrived. To feel you so close yet to know you couldn’t be further away is so hard. and we wish with all our heart we could hug you one last time.

We are met at Vinh railway station by Uoc, the Vietnamese secondary school teacher who helped your friends after the accident. He is one of very few fluent English speakers in this remote part of Vietnam. Josh, we want you know this about Uoc; he is a complete LEG-END. One of the kindest, most thoughtful people we have ever met. Before our trip, and when first we contacted the British Embassy in Hanoi we asked how we could find the man who was called out from his class to translate and help with the police reports. We received an email almost by return from Uoc himself – it was as if he’d been waiting for us to find him. Now as we step of the train (which is running nearly and hour late) he is there to greet us. He has spotted us immediately (mind you, we are pretty easy to identify as the only white people on the platform) and guides us to a food stall under some trees near the taxi rank. Uoc has the look of a young boy, with wide eyes that are hungry for knowledge and as we sit drinking sweet cold sugar cane juice, he begins to tell us what happened when he arrived at the scene of your accident. But it is all too much too soon. We have only just stepped off the train and we need to adjust a little more to being in the presence of the man who would’ve seen your body lying in the road. The enormity of what lies ahead for us, is, we realize, only now beginning to sink in.

Main street in Huong Son

We arrive at Uoc’s home town Huong Son after a two hour dusty car ride through countryside that we imagine you too would have been familiar with. Not that many cars on the road but so many motorbikes, so many trucks and buses, all with horns blaring, weaving through potholes, overtaking, undertaking, this side, which side of the road, all avoiding each other and all surviving, all somehow staying alive to do the same tomorrow. It is midday and Uoc takes us for lunch. Huong Son is not the sort of place for restaurant so you get and you eat what you’re given. Soup, noodles, pigs foot, some spring rolls (as you will know you get spring rolls of varying quality everywhere in Vietnam) and some strange pickled berry things that are common fare for the indigenous peoples from the hills not far from here – (not that nice!)

Huong Son buzzes with life but it is far from the tourist trail and the rooms in the hotel Uoc has booked for us are dark and decrepid; a Turkish jail would have more charm. Very basic really, particularly after the luxury of the house in Hoi An but again the sort of place you would’ve taken it in your stride – (note to selves – must look up that footage you took of deciding who should get the beds by playing paper/rock/scissors – you lost we think). But Uoc has planned everything for us with real sensitivity and he wants us to be fully rested before he takes us to Vu Quang. Jimmy and Joe doze, Jane stays awake. It is late afternoon when Uoc comes back to collect us.

Vu Quang and the moment on Ho Chi Minh highway where you swerved to avoid an old man walking his bike up the hill, is a short half hour journey away. In the car with us are Uoc, his sister and his two year old baby daughter Sami who bounces around between front and back seat. There is something normalising about them being there. For them just another ordinary day out. Rosa points out Vietnam is so spiritual there is room for both life and death here.

We are now traveling down the same road you and your friends were on two years ago and we can all sense the exhilaration and the real fun you would be having on your motorbikes as the countryside, this beautiful countryside sped past. The road rises and falls over a gently undulating landscape of forest and farmland both meeting the roadside as abruptly as past meeting the present. The driver narrowly misses a water buffalo which has decided to resist its owners attempts to prevent it taking a shit in the middle of the highway.

A mile or so later we begin to recognize the landscape from the photos of the area we have seen on Google Maps. The road divides into a dual carriage way and the line of lampposts on the central island stretch into the distance. The driver slows and pulls over to the side as we approach what looks like a roadside police check and our first thought is we have been booked for speeding. But Uoc has arranged for us to meet the cop who attended the scene of your accident. This is amazing. Uoc really has thought of everything to make this journey of ours as meaningful as possible. The policeman looks at Joe and then at Rosa saying they must be your brother and sister as they look so much like you. He then follows on his bike and a couple of miles later we again pull over to the side.

We are here. The heat blasts us as we step out of the car. (All new cars in Vietnam have air-con – but we guess you know that!) It’s like walking into a wall of solid hot air but we also have a very real sense that we are stepping through a curtain of time, to a place where time itself no longer has the power to order our lives. The early evening sun throws long shadows as we clamber out onto the tarmac. We are a now family of five again, together in spirit and bound by love and our completeness spreads out across the hard gritty surface with an unexpected and soothing calm. Here at the place of your death we can feel the chains of mourning beginning to loosen just a little. At first there is nothing to say. Then our wondering becomes wandering and silently we begin to explore the scene, each our own archeologist superimposing previous imaginings onto this very real, this very actual roadside . When did we-five become we-four? How did five become four? Why, oh why did we lose you? In some ways we already know the answers to these questions so what we learn here is confirmation not of the facts of your death but a sort of joining together of our own stories – stories that were ‘then’ becoming much more stories that are ‘now’, and stories we can now perhaps stitch together into the fabric of what has to be – our lives continuing on while yours does not.

A constant stream of dumper trucks labours up the hill from the nearby quarry. Past them and on either side flow motorbikes with a variety of loads, hay bales, water canisters, mattresses. Did you see them like we see them now? A farmer harnesses an ox to his cart and leads it across the road oblivious of the traffic. Did you notice him? Somewhere behind a gateway a dog barks. Did you hear it? And did you see, did you sense, were you aware of the people rushing to the roadside as you fell? Because Josh, just as two years ago when they came to witness something out of the ordinary on this unremarkable stretch of the Ho Chi Minh Highway, so now they are gathering to watch and observe us, a party of Europeans with their cameras and their sunburn and their somber looks. There seems to be something vaguely amusing in this spectacle until Uoc explains our presence. He thinks he has discovered someone who actually saw your accident: someone who then explains at length the events of that day. The crowd assembles while we wait for the translation, but it turns out he is only a friend of the person who saw it. As would happen anywhere, everybody wants a piece of the action, a claim on the tale to be told; especially when death is one of the players. This is of no consequence. It is clear that all the stories of that terrible day do tally and we are content just hear the sound of voices and be in the presence of strangers that have also been marked by your death.

And Josh, they have been marked and they do remember. On 16th January each year since, a small shrine appears by this roadside. Wherever we have gone in Vietnam, people remember their dead by bringing offerings, (you will like this Josh) of sweets, beer, chocolates, fruit and cake! – and of course incense. Uoc says he too comes here on that day bringing as he does today a box of cakes. We begin to prepare our own shrine for you. We have brought a few momentos; some photos, one of your business cards, a Ministry of Sound CD, a card from the Gales, a string of shells that Hollie and Charlie have made. One of the villagers runs over with an old yogurt pot filled with sand. This is to place our incense sticks and at first he wants to put it in the middle of the road, on the actual spot where you lost your life. Others are walking out into the highway to debate the point. Is it here, no more likely it is there, perhaps it was here; we can see them becoming quite troubled in their need to get it right. Would you know, would you care?

In the end we call them back to the verge and the yogurt pot finds what feels like its rightful place under the safety barrier. Uoc leads our little ritual and lights the incense sticks which we take turns to set in the sand. This is our biggest moment and it is not without tears – and a long, long group hug. In the purest and simplest way possible we are honouring you and we are remembering you with a small ceremony that is and will remain as important to us as your funeral. But this time we are borrowing from another culture and another set of beliefs where people are expected to live on, to be reincarnated, where karma is of utmost importance to life and death, and where the spirit of ones ancestors have a sacred place at the heart of every home to be looked after and revered for all time. 80% of Vietnamese are Buddhists and practicing or not there isn’t a house in this country where the first thing you see as you enter is a shrine to the departed.

Uoc, his sister, and 2 year old and the policeman are squatting by the roadside. They are watching Joe as he ties some Tibetan prayer flags onto a lamppost (another gift from the Gales). Below it he scratches your name. Rosa scratches a kiss. Uoc promises that he will continue to come here every year on January 16th – and we believe him – absolutely. ‘This is’ he says ‘your day of the dead’. We are not Buddhists and we don’t believe in life after death, but what we did last Monday was deeply affecting. We will carry this moment and make it part of our goodbye to you… our forever.

With so much love

Mum and Dad

Uoc is standing next to Jane – the policeman who attended the scene is in the middle

Ps – later that evening Uoc invited us around to his house for dinner. Afterwards some of his students came round eager to practice their English. Joe was more than happy to oblige with an impromptu evening class.

Uoc and his wife and baby are standing next to Joe – his grandmother seated next to Jimmy (recently renamed ‘the happy buddha!)

Arrived mid evening after 14 hour flight via Dubai feeling buzzed out but not too tired. The taxi from the airport was our first experience with Vietnamese traffic, the driver leaning on his horn while weaving through the only other vehicles on the road – motorbikes, motor cycles, scooters – the rules of traffic being seemingly non existant. Hands over ears and eyes most of the time. Check in to Hotel Continental – spartan but comfortable – not as ‘faded glory’ as I had imagined – polished marble floors, chipped paint and spotlessly clean if a little soulless – the colonial era has given way to socialist efficiency. If Graham Green and Somerset Maughan had stayed here there’s no sign of these illustrious guests – any other hotel would have huge pictures of them in the lobby . There was however a massive photo of a bride and groom – weekends is wedding time as Michael the butler from Claridges would say and over this weekend the hotel would cram three in. The first of these was in full swing in the courtyard, the music rising with the heat and causing Joe and Rosa some concern for their sleep. Jane and I had a room on the other side of the building. Jane was out like a light but I stayed awake till 1.30 having started to watch a documentary about the American war in Vietnam – “Hearts and Minds” a brilliant and beautifully made film.

When you open the hotel window on the morning of your first day in a foreign country, the novelty of it all wraps round you like a brand new scarf. The heat, piped music from the square, the advertising hordings, the constant roar of motorbikes, all confirmation that we are here at the start of our journey to find out more about the country Joshua was traveling through. The motorbikes of course have special significance – Josh was riding a 100cc Honda Win when he died and every time I see one of these bikes, my thoughts spin back to those earliest imaginings in the days after we received the news of his accident. But already I’m getting a sense that these machines and the roads they inhabit are not ‘the accident waiting to happen’ as we had feared. To ride in what looks like chaos does not mean it is unsafe though I guess a fundamental requirement is to have 360 degree awareness of everyone else around you.

It takes a while to learn how to cross the road

Breakfast was a disaster – every conceivable meal and taste seemed to be catered for – porridge with meat balls, noodles, dim sum, as well as croissants and fruit yogurts. The coffee was disgusting – was it laced with cardamon, coriander, or chicory – probably none of these, maybe all of them. I decide to stay with jasmine tea with slices of tropical fruits.

Ho CHi Minh is everywhere

We spent the first part of the day wandering the streets of central Saigon – it is Ho Chi Minh’s birthday tomorrow and there are red flags and posters of him everywhere, even a special photo display in the square. Something to look forward to. We don’t have a lot of time in Saigon so whatever we do will be very cursory – a spin through the market, a visit to the War Museum, a high speed lift up the city’s archectural icon to modernity – the Bitexco Financial Building, a meal seated on children’s stools on the pavement. This unsurprisingly turned out to be the better of any of the food we’ve eaten. There was a menu but our order disappeared further off down the street to someone squatting over a small stove in a doorway. Call me old fashioned but food hygiene in the modern world leaves a lot to be desired – taste!

Good Morning Vietnam (photo: Joe)

Her first day in Saigon and Rosa is picked up for soliciting !?!? (photo: Jimmy)

The War Remnants Museum (photo: Jimmy)Sea Cadets at the War Remnants Museum (photo: Jimmy)

On Sunday we became a bonefide contributors to Vietnam’s booming tourist economy with the purchase of a day trip to the Mekong Delta. The mini bus arrived at the hotel at 8.15 on the dot – standard Viet punctuality – before rounding up our fellow sight seers from the various other internationally branded hotels in central Saigon. On board were Korean, Chinese, Japanese, even some Vietnamese all with American accents. Our destination was My Tho, nearly two hours away down Highway One. Just to make sure we were on the right road in the right country our guide galloped us through 3000 years of Vietnam’s history and the two Indochinese wars – the first against the French and the second against the Americans. I didn’t catch every word – his English was good but heavily accented and what with the constant beeping of the buses horn I think I just about got a sense that his war, or what would surely have been his parents war was in effect against the communists. Vietnam opened up to tourism with the lifting of the US blockade in the early 1990’s and the influx of foreign capital. Our guide seemed happy enough with this development. In one of the first documentaries I cut for television, ‘Apocalpse Then’, I well remember a scene with huge Coca Cola banners hanging on the façade of the Hanoi Opera House – (the equivalent would be 20 metre high portraits of HO Chi Minh draped over the National Gallery by Trafalgar Square). The Vietnamese call this ‘market socialism’ and in copying the Chinese, have adopted what is probably the most efficient and most developed form of capitalism, a state controlled commodity economy in which one of the best sellers is history and authenticity.

A short boat trip from the bus station across the river and we were in what was explained to us as a ‘village’ and we were being shown around a ‘villagers house’ just down the path from the local ‘market’. It felt very conveniently mapped out for the continual stream of cameras and video recorders. On sale was of course was, every traditional handicraft – sarongs, t shirts, lacquer bowls, coconut sculptures, much more than I care to remember. We were then invited to sit and enjoy some ‘traditional’ folk music including horribly scraped out versions of John Lennons ‘Imagine’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. I suspect that we haven’t as yet found the Vietnam that Josh was getting to know.

On our return to Saigon, we found that the celebrations for Ho Chi Minh’s birthday were non existant… mind you he is a symbol of revolutionary fervour, not necessarily of capitalist growth, something that has been in double figures for the past two decades.

Midday – Mekong Delta – waiting for the rain to pass (photo: Jimmy)Without Josh we wouldn’t be here … (photo: Jimmy)The old and the new (photo: Jimmy)

Josh died on the Ho Chi Minh Highway near the town of Vu Quang in the north of Vietnam just over two years ago. Two years that have both flown and dragged by. Two years and his death still seems so unreal, so unnatural. The boy that was becoming a man, venturing abroad to discover what life had in store for him – how could he not now be living that life.

Perhaps we have too many photos and film clips of him – so many good memories shielding us from the pain of his death, of his absence; so many happy, vibrant, quizzical pictures of Josh as alive as any could be. Too many good stories that have, in a curious way, built up a fog of uncertainty around the fact of his death; a fact that should have been confirmed when, the day before the funeral, we all four of us stood round his casket and gazed on his lifeless form. We stroked his cold hands and kissed his cold forehead and tried to take in this awful reality. We were with him then for an hour, maybe only half an hour, who knows; time stood still. But hovering in the night air, the question no parent should ever have to ask: “why is our son so quiet; why is he lying in a box?” We were there; his mother, father, sister and brother. In his jeans and T shirt, Josh was there with ashen face, and sightless eyes. We must have known the answer to that question But that was then and this is now and time has discarded the evidence that was once so very clear. If my mind ever told me then that Josh has not and will never return home, my soul has continued to say no, still and forever no; this is not true; he is not dead. Joshua is out there still, wandering somewhere in this big world of ours.

Laos and Thailand November/December 2010

As a family we always knew that one day we would travel to Vietnam to visit the spot where Joshua had his accident. And that day is almost here. We fly out on 16th May. Our initial idea was to continue Josh’s own journey, with a bit of an overlap. We would start in Laos travel through to Hanoi and then journey south to Saigon and from there to Cambodia. This would have been Josh’s plans as he made his way back to Thailand and thence to India and Nepal. Maybe one day Jane and I may well do this, but for now we have decided to concentrate on visiting Vietnam and Cambodia. We will want to soak up the atmosphere, particularly of Vietnam so that we can have a sense of the place that Josh was enjoying so much. Starting in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City officially but still referred to locally as Sai Gon) we will then spend a week in Hoi An before visiting Vu Quang where we hope to meet with the school teacher that spoke English and helped Josh’s friends with the aftermath of the tragedy. Then tracing Josh’s last journey in reverse we will spend next few days in Hanoi including a nightover in one of the many junks that cruise Halong Bay famed for its thousands of small limestone islands.

With friends in Halong Bay – 11th January 2011Halong Bay

Joe will have to go back to work after two weeks but Jane, Rosa and I will then fly down to Siem Reap in Cambodia, and gorge on all the temples of Ankgor Wat and the surrounding area, before traveling through to Phnom Penh and hopefully a few days lazing on one of the many tropical islands in the Gulf of Thailand. Thats the plan but who knows, and who cares if it actually works out like that.

With Tram, Hanoi, January 2011

What’s important for the four of us, is that the trip is both a kind of pilgrimage as well as a well earned holiday. Josh will of course be with us all the way but we don’t want his death and the sadness we all feel to get in the way of what can also be a journey of discovery. When Josh died we were all changed in ways we never thought possible and certainly never wanted. This trip may well be our chance to find out more about who we have become. I don’t think we are looking for ‘closure’ (as some have suggested) or that after we have been to the site of the accident, that we can then somehow “move on”. Who knows what we will feel, or how we will react. Personally I feel a desperate need to connect with the place where Josh died so suddenly; not so much as a way of imagining a horror of the scene, more as an attempt to encounter a reality, an ordinary everyday reality with ordinary people, people who may wonder why we are there, why we have arrived at this particular bit of roadside. And when we stand silently together, looking for signs, for clues, maybe take photographs of the empty highway, perhaps then we will know that the circumstances of Joshua’s death are both mundane and extraordinary. Both so deeply personal, so individually painful, as well as so universally commonplace. Perhaps then I won’t have to dig so deep, past days and months of waking up to each morning’s cruel reminder, past the continual background noise of Josh’s death, past all the things we have done to create a new life for him, to find that ghost of a memory that tells me, yes I did see him lying there … dead as ever dead can be.

Full Moon Festival – Hoi An

An important moment will be Joshua’s 25th birthday on 23rd May. We will be in Hoi An and it just so happens that the famous Full Moon Festival for May is on the 23rd. Apparently its not at all like the full moon beach parties of Thailand where everyone just gets smashed out of their head – this really is about honouring traditional cultures with lots of poetry and folk music and of course thousands of lanterns. So we’ll definitely be setting one off for Josh.

Watch out for regular postings to this blog while we are a away – check Josh’s Facebook page, Postcards to Josh, and throw in some of your own thoughts and stories to the comments below – with lots of love Jimmy